Why we build the sites we design

The standard arrangement is that an agency designs a site and a development shop builds it. It is a clean division of labour and it produces, with impressive reliability, a website that is about eighty percent of the thing that was presented.

The missing twenty percent is never in the big decisions. It is in the spacing between a heading and the paragraph under it, the way a card behaves when the title runs to three lines, what the form does when the connection drops halfway through. None of that is in the design file, because a design file is a picture of one state of one page at one width.

The handover problem

A developer receiving that file has to invent the other states. They are not being careless when they get it wrong. They are guessing, because the information was never given to them, and there is no efficient way to give it to them short of specifying every state of every component, which costs more than building it.

So the designer becomes a reviewer, filing tickets about padding, and the relationship turns adversarial over things neither party thinks are important enough to be arguing about.

What changes when it is the same two people

• 01Nothing gets presented that cannot be built, because the person who has to build it is in the room
• 02The states nobody drew get decided by the person who drew the ones that exist
• 03There is no handover meeting, no specification document, and no ticket queue
• 04When something is slow, one person is accountable, and that person answers the phone

The trade is capacity. Two people cannot take on eight site builds at once, and we do not pretend otherwise. What we can promise is that the thing you approved is the thing that ships.